


quantum theory could explain the passage of time

by inkspl0tches



Category: The X-Files
Genre: F/M, happy new years i dont know what this is
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-31
Updated: 2015-12-31
Packaged: 2018-05-10 18:07:45
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,569
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5595778
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inkspl0tches/pseuds/inkspl0tches
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It is the New Year. It is a beginning.</p>
            </blockquote>





	quantum theory could explain the passage of time

**2015, the end**

In the six minutes before the new year he tells her he’d missed her in Graceland.

“That was a long time ago, Mulder,” she murmurs into the phone.

She is used to telling him this, the words falling heavy and rote off her tongue. It used to feel poignant, to twist and look over her shoulder and find their share years like dominos collapsed behind her. That was a long time ago, she’d smirked when he’d joked about buying her an expensive desk for their newly re-inhabited office. Tonight, on the cusp of a new year, it tugs at her to point out how far they are from where they started. The years that separate them are about to gain a number. She feels like scratching thin tallies into a cell wall.

“I know,” he agrees. “But it’s true. I did miss you.”

She doesn’t tell him she’d missed him back, because she hadn’t. With a needle pressed to the base of her spine instead of his fingers, she hadn’t missed him at all. The green glow of her bedside clock hums into a new set of months. They are silent for a minute.

Then: barely words, whispered over the phone line like they are speaking in clandestine code, fearful of being overheard (and that’s not what they’re afraid of at all): 

Happy New Year, Scully.

Happy New Year, Mulder.

He never asks, although he could if he wanted to because she’d allow him any number of intrusions at this point, if she is thinking what he is. She’s never sure if it’s because he knows she is, or is certain she isn’t.

“Four years,” he says with the tone of someone who can’t believe the evidence they’ve been provided. It sounds nothing like him.

“Four years,” she mutters. If she approximated then it’s been nearly 1500 days since she left him, but she has stopped trying to press them into a formula, understand them with equation.

Should old acquaintance be forgot? He laughs, half-presses a tune into the receiver. It’s auld, Mulder, she corrects, instinctively, not old.

Still, he presses, should they be forgotten or not?

He’s framed it like a philosophical question, the way he always does. Winter of 2000, just barely, and he’d trapped her into a debate about the logic of everlasting love, propped on an elbow on a pillow in her bed. _I think what you mean is you love me_ (and she’d been haughty about it, ever the academic and endlessly smug) had been the winning argument and she’d tugged him toward her to collect some sort of prize. “Forever,” was too cliche to add on, too unquantifiable. It had gone unspoken between them like a back-room deal. Handshake, gentleman's word, in winter of 2000 she wasn’t planning on going anywhere.

“Never,” she says now, answering his question. “Never.”

 

 

 

  
**2012, the start**

There was no physical representation of a new beginning. The world did not wipe itself clean when it was instructed to. As a girl she’d wanted to press nature into a calendar’s firm structure.

How very unscientific of you, Mulder murmurs into her hair. She rests a hand against the cold glass of their wide living room windows. The wind teases the tall grass beyond their porch into a simply choreographed sway, grey snow sliding off their steps as it appeases the laws of thermal energy.

It is the 1st of January on the last year of the world and everything looks exactly the same.

“I don’t feel any different,” she tells him. The warm fog of her handprint against the window fades.

“I don’t think we’re supposed to.”

She twists in his arms to rest the curve of her palm against his chest. “I might if I married you,” she muses. In their bedroom, two hours before, she’d agreed with the easy acquiescence of welcoming the inevitable. There were universal invariants, and then there was she and Mulder, and somewhere between mosquito bites and Antarctica they’d risen to the scientific permanence of the latter.

He grins. “Til' death do us part?”

Not even then, she thinks. Years ago he’d slept through the seasons, been buried in the frozen ground and held her hand by the summer.

Their ending is marked in black on a calendar, has been for years, but the world outside does not always obey human instruction. A gust of wind blows snow from the roof of the house, scatters it across their yard, changes the landscape. She kisses him like filling in a blank space with an answer she’s kept tucked up her sleeve for years.

 

 

 

**2006, but only just barely**

They don’t have friends. It’s one of the rules of being fugitives from the federal government, you don’t really get to know your neighbors. Years on the run hadn’t come with a guidebook (he’d called her Sundance for a week, smiling, until she’d reminded him both Butch and his trusty sidekick had been killed in a shootout), but some things just apply, unwritten.

So at the end of 2005 she’d politely declined invitations to various work related celebrations in order to get suitably drunk with Mulder at their kitchen table. She tastes champagne every time she kisses him, which is often because she hasn’t been able to handle her alcohol since William was born, and she’s become sloppily affectionate, winding up on his lap twenty minutes after popping open a bottle and tilting her head against his shoulder like it’s too heavy to hold up. The weight of the world and various other burdens have already curved her shoulders. She breathes against his collarbone.

“I have never,” she says, quietly, “made one good New Year’s resolution. Ever.” She taps him gently on the chest for emphasis, remembering how she’d sworn to herself once not to follow him on every crazy whim and had instead wound up terrified, shot and charmed beyond affection into something closer to love on his couch on Christmas morning.

She laughs without telling him why, and he smiles at her, says, smug, “I have.”

Narrowing her eyes she kisses him once on the jaw to collect her thoughts. “If you say it was to get me into bed in the fake new Millennium I’m gonna kick your ass.”

“That wasn’t it.”

She pulls away a little, tries to pull him into pristine focus. “Right year though? Right year. Wrong resolution.”

“Exactly.”

An interesting discovery had presented itself to her some years ago. Not of scientific proportions, but significant nonetheless. If she gets close enough, specifically until her forehead is against his, she can make him tell her almost anything. She puts it into practice now, whispers “what was the resolution,” against his lips.

“I can’t tell you,” he whispers back.

“Did you break it?”

“I try not to.”

She brackets his face gently in her sensible doctor’s hands. Narrows her eyes. He blinks slowly back at her, his eyes soft and it’s not because of the alcohol.

She remembers that only Mulder, perpetually hounded by the eidolic and otherworldly, could talk her into sleep against his shoulder after pulling her through a haunted house and have her last coherent thoughts be of wishing maybe, she would have the courage to kiss him when she woke up. That only he could kiss her and make her believe in a new millennium despite its mathematical inconsistency, could laugh against the zombie bruises on her neck and tell her the world hadn’t ended because she’d saved it again, and again, and again.

“Okay,” she whispers and folds him closer, holds him to her like a slip of fortune paper that had come unexpectedly, softly true.

 

 

 

  
**2003, and it came in with a bang**

Motel walls are thin, betraying secrets. Earlier he’d pressed a gentle hand over her lips and she’d tasted hundreds of miIes on his palm. Now, in the next room over there is a drunken crash, insofar as a crash can sound drunk, a cheer of “Happy New Year!”

It’s good, the noise on either side of them, the cold press of air outside the motel windows. It makes them feel safer than they are, and when she screams that she wishes he’d hate her because, god, it’s just so fucking unbearable for him to touch her like she’s perfect when she’s unforgivable, when she’s verging on more criminal than he is, it is masked by the sounds of other people’s joy, when the lamp breaks against the wall it is covered by someone else’s celebration.

He wants to know what he can do, what does she want, what does she need from him and his voice is still so gentle and it hurts, physically, like a skinned knee or a scraped elbow, how much he loves her so she turns on him, caged animal fast. She backs him up against the wall. “Say you hate me,” she demands. “Or that you wish I hadn’t done it, or that you don’t understand why I did it, just don’t fucking say you forgive me, don’t say it again.”

He shakes his head. “I can’t, I can’t do that, Scully.”

On the turn of the new year he’d said his resolution was to believe William was safe and it had sounded so false, so compliant, so sweet that it had thrown her into rage against the way he laid down convictions for her. He’d never let a child go before, never accepted a disappearance without a full scale battle. She does not want him to look for their son, but she wishes he would fight her to let him try.

  
“I know,” she hisses now, turns on her heel and pushes past him on her way out of their door. “And I can’t do this for another year.”

The sky outside is uncharacteristically free of clouds and the stars scramble to their places, stretching over miles of highway and dirt road. I wish I may I wish I might, she thinks and blows out a puff of frozen air. She’s out of wishes, out of resolution. The door behind her stays closed.

 

 

 

**2000, only the first few moments**

His lips on hers are a starting place on a gameboard. The new millennium is a myth, it’s not real, but they’ve stumbled into something that is.

He drapes his arm around her shoulders. Two steps forward (three steps back, was the old formula for their non-linear motion, but she feels only his gentle heat against her, feels the tug of inertia in her sternum).

They’ve been playing at a dangerous game. She kisses him again, later, says, _it’s me_. It’s her, it’s them. They might finally be winning.

 

 

 

**1997, with its dying breath**

“A party,” she deadpans.

“A ‘Death of the Year’ party,” he clarifies.

“That sounds morbid.”

“It isn’t.”

And they wind up swaying on the fire escape Gunmen’s apartment building, the air smelling like secondhand smoke and bitter December wind. The Church filters out the open window he’d pulled her out of, complaining it was so hot in there and, in a false voice, could he bum a smoke and she was laughing like she was fifteen, scraping her shin against the ragged sill to clamber after him. _Wish I knew what you were looking for_ , someone inside sings along, soft, _Might have known what you would find_.

There isn’t really an excuse, a good one, for how she’s pressed against him except for that it is very cold and the space on the fire escape is very small and she isn’t really sure what his intentions were when he’d pulled her out there but she wasn’t drunk enough to kiss him, was barely drunk enough to let him hold her, but, like she said, the space on the fire escape was fit for one, so she’d sniffed, “I’m cold,” and let him wrap her in his arms.

“Wanna dance?” he asks when she’s too close to do anything but nod into his chest. She wonders what dancing in such a small space entails. He rocks gently, side to side, their arms around each other like statues molded into place. The guitar thrums from behind them, the singer asks again what they’re looking for, what they want to find.

From the fire escape she can just make out the light of the Capitol, the stark line of the monument. Red lights at the top burn, snake eyes in the shimmering dark. A countdown is taking place behind them, Mulder’s hands are tracing circles on her back.

“1997 is dead!” Someone, and it’s probably Frohike, yells from inside. “Long live 1998!”

Mulder repeats the sentiment, the air freezing his words. He smiles sloppily down at her. It doesn’t fit, but part of her wants to add: and may it live happily ever after.

 

 

**1993, the beginning**

Mulder calls fifteen minutes after she walks, only the slightest bit tipsy, in her front door.

“I’m late,” he says when she picks up. She looks at her watch.

“Only by an hour.”

This is Mulder, who calls her too late and walks too many steps ahead. She wonders why he’s calling, and finds she already knows. There is an ease, a rhythm to his idiosyncrasies. She’s known him since March, he’s fascinated her since April, scared her since early fall and now, in the dead of winter or, she supposes, the pulse of the new year, she finds she can outline him in full. Long limbs and a tangle of thought, electric impulses, hot to the touch. He is some deep, brilliant tragedy, pulled together under the trench coat of a federal agent.

The crackle of his voice over the phone is already too familiar.

“I was calling,” he starts.

“To wish me happy new year,” she finishes.

“Yeah,” she hears his smile. “And to ask you something.”

“Oh?” She brings the phone closer to her ear, cradled against her shoulder as she tucks her legs under her on the couch.

He wants to know about her year, the most interesting parts. The question is so sincere, so fraught with childlike sweetness that he reminds her of Melissa, for a moment, who believes unequivocally in the power of the New Year, just as she believes in the healing power of crystals and some intrinsic logic in astrological alignments.

She tells him her year was boring. He laughs. “Even with the liver eating mutant part?”

She fakes a yawn. The mutant was child’s play, Mulder.

They tease each other for long minutes over the phone. The mutant was kid’s stuff? Well what about the military base and the possible clones? Too banal? The twins with psychic abilities? Nothing phased them. She smiles, her cheeks flushed. She forgets she is a spy.

“Scully?” he says quietly, she’s already said goodnight. Her finger hovers over the “end” button on the phone.

“Yes?”

“It was nice to meet you.”

She laughs, because only he could pry sincerity out of a quip. She imagines his crooked smile, the one he sometimes threw her when she raised her eyebrows at his jokes instead of laughing, or when someone hissed “Spooky” in the hall and he pretended not to have heard.

“Oh, Mulder,” she smiles into the phone. “It was nice to meet you too.”

The world, grey and still, holds its breath. It is the New Year. It is a beginning.


End file.
